Underwater cables: where the ocean meets the internet – in pictures
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The British photographer Andy Sewell’s latest project, Known and Strange Things Pass, recently published by Skinnerboox for £40, looks at what lies beneath our online life. Mixing images of the internet’s underwater infrastructure with daily life, it explores the physical and metaphorical entanglement of the ocean and the internet. It will be exhibited by Robert Morat Gallery in Berlin and the V&A in London, later this year
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Sewell’s photographs are taken on either side of the Atlantic in places where the internet is concentrated. Where the fibres of the network come together, a few strands of optical fibre stretch along the seabed, connecting continents.
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In an essay commenting on Sewell’s collection for the online contemporary photography magazine 1000 Words, Eugénie Shinkle writes: ‘These cables are only one thread in a web of analogy that explores what it means to be in the world at the present moment.’
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‘As the ocean meets the shore it exists, for a moment, in an unsettled form, a liquid mass leavened with air and transformed into foam,’ Shinkle writes.
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Inside the landing station, where the cable comes onshore on the UK’s south-west coast.
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‘I like what the repetition of pictures with barely perceptible differences does to the flow and rhythm,’ says Andy Sewell. ‘At first they read like a glitch. Haven’t I seen that already? They send the viewer back to the previous instance to compare it against. I think it helps us to look closer.’
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Sewell continues: ‘And the way the different sequences are entangled, a bit like with polyphony in music, can suggest worlds we might think of as separate – the near and the distant, the ocean and the internet, the physical and the virtual, what we think of as natural with the cultural and technological – can’t be cleanly separated from each other.’
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‘These cables make landfall in unremarkable places. They’re housed in mundane materials – concrete and metal, rubber and bitumen. Their form gives no hint of their function,’ Shinkle writes.
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The ship is loaded with thousands of miles of cable, carefully wound by hand into tanks to be paid out later from the stern. Close to shore, in water shallower than 1,500 metres, the cables are buried to protect them – but in deep water they lie on the seabed.
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The American end of cabling carrying the internet between Europe and North America. ‘More than 2.5 quintillion bytes of information are created and shared every day,’ notes Shinkle.
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Cable being manufactured at a factory in Calais, France.
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